Dog

I stumbled upon this link at Andrew Sullivan's website yesterday and it sounds a little too familiar:

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated...

It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

Well, I've been aware for some time that my writing is in no urgent need of preservation. I am not the kind of person to let things die, though. First I let them fade toward a mediocre end so that by the time they're really gone, no one really notices. Not with a bang but a whimper, and so on.

On that note, they're putting down my childhood dog soon. She's nearly eighteen years old now, so she's been with my family for the vast majority of my conscious life. Nearly all of it, in fact--or all, if a third grader is not considered conscious. But I remember the day I brought her home as a puppy. It was January of 1991 and she sat in my lap as we drove her from my grandma's friend's house in the back of the red Nissan pickup truck. My little brother, in Kindergarten at the time, wanted to name her Sally. But she was mine--I'd been heartsick for a dog for years by then--so I named her after a magical cat in a book I'd read recently. Little did I know that I was also naming her after a well-known brand of cat food. Well, we got home and introduced the puppy to my dad, who was lying on the floor reading a newspaper. She promptly peed on his socks. Nevertheless, she was always a great dog.

Here she is in happier times.



And here, a few years ago.


The weather has alternated between furnace and windswept tundra. My life has alternated between dull and frustrating. One night it is too hot to sleep inside, our apartment a greenhouse sweltering even with all the fans turned on. M. is out with the Englishman, phone-less and late enough to worry me all the way to crazytown; I sit out on the roof as the sun comes up, read a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, sip a beer and feel sorry for myself. Granted, I do take some decent pictures. (Not pictured.) Maybe it's the sun's rays that knock some sense into me. By the time M. gets back, I'm not terribly angry, mostly tired. And the next night it's freezing inside. We flick on on the electric yuppie fireplace. I am working on my math homework, making pasta, watching The Wire. I used to watch no television at all, but ever since my bizarre discovery that I can actually get more work done while watching something, I just haven't stopped. Right now it's Arrested Development at work and The Wire at home. But there's also been Dexter, Weeds, Firefly, Heroes, and anything else available online on Netflix or Hulu. I'm worried that I'm becoming too passive a consumer of entertainment.

I'm worried that I'm overcompensating for my lack of posting by writing a novel. A bad novel. Postmodern with a swirl o' vomit. Gbye then.

The Mittens Affair

I'm reposting something I posted a long time ago, because (1) I'm lazy, (2) I have to work, (3) I'm too tired to come up with anything original, and (4), because I ran into the subject of the subsequent post yesterday. I was eating lunch in the courtyard--with my hands, because I'm a disgusting, uncivilized creature--and someone blond and bearded walked toward me.

He waved. "Hi--is that you, Penitent?" he said.

"Yes...?"

"Do you remember me? From a long, long time ago? Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. I just graduated, and I thought it was so strange that I saw you right before leaving."

Oh, yeah--suddenly, I recognized him:

---

There was a particular period of time near the beginning of my Junior year, when I worked in the Media center of the University Library, during which all the University's forces of Disquiet seemed to be assaulting me at once. There was the shadowy character who derived some enjoyment from speaking to me in affected foreign accents and thereby pretending to be different people in turn; there was the persistent Argentine law student and the desperate Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, and there was the day that two separate people asked to watch Home Alone within one minute of each other.

But certainly the most memorable of these incidents was the one involving the Nightmare on Elm Street boxed set, a freshman studying philosophy, and a pair of mittens.

Every night I worked for a couple of weeks, a gang of three geeky-looking boys had been coming into the Media department asking for successive installments in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. One was tall and pale, dressed all in black, with white-blond hair and blond eyelashes. The other two were smaller and dark-haired; one wore thick-rimmed, black-framed glasses. Since I found it notable that anyone would care to watch all six of these movies, I began to recognize the boys and chuckled to myself every time they left with yet another Freddy Kreuger movie.

One night, as I handed Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare over the counter to the boys, I was met with a fit of hysterical giggling that I couldn't explain, but I had the distinct feeling that it had something to do with me. I narrowed my eyes at the boys as I asked for an ID card, but their giggling didn't stop. They left with the movie and I continued about my business (probably: working a crossword puzzle clipped from the student newspaper), but at some point I looked up and noticed that one of the little bastards, the tall blond one, was skulking about suspiciously and with no apparent purpose.

"Do you need anything?" I asked rudely in that brusque tone I had cultivated exclusively for library clientele.

The guy moved up to the counter. "I have a question," he asked.

"Yes?"

"Do you like mittens?"

This was not a question I had expected. I blinked.

"What?"

"Do you, like, mittens?" His tone was matter-of-fact, as though he were repeating a routine query that I was so deaf as to mishear.

"I...I don't think I have any particularly strong feelings about mittens, one way or the other," I finally said, extremely wary.

The strange boy nodded. "Okay," he said, and, evidently satisfied, walked out and away.

---

He returned, though, over the following weeks: sometimes alone, sometimes snickering with his conspirators. "So, have you thought about it: do you like mittens?" he persisted. I began to expect his visit. Often he would come in without his friends and, apparently, without intending to check out DVDs at all.

One night I took note of the name on his ID card and searched for him in the University directory. Therein I made the discovery that he was a freshman, a philosophy major, and a resident of a dormitory in which my acquaintance "Laura" worked as a Resident Assistant. The next time I saw Laura I told her about her resident's strange behavior and asked if she could provide an explanation.

"He's a little weird," she said. "Maybe he likes you."

She informed Mittens Boy of our little discussion. Mittens Boy, in turn, told me that she had told him. I told Laura that Mittens Boy had told me that she had told him. So it goes.

---

A lull in the Mittens Affair. And breaking the lull: a party at the co-op in which I lived for three of the four years of my undergraduate career.

It was a good party, I think, or at least a decent one. The party itself, though, is irrelevant to the story at hand. What is not irrelevant is what followed the party--I returned to my room only to find, resting atop my pillow, a pair of blue woolen mittens.

I was actually afraid. To this point I had presumed Mittens Boy to be essentially harmless: a little quirky, perhaps a little creepy, but not worrisomely so. Breaking into my room, though? I felt a bit discomposed. Running to find Laura, I brought her so she could see the unwanted gift. "Did you tell Mittens Boy where to find me?" I asked.

She thought the whole thing was very funny. (I admit that, abstractly, it was.) She claimed no part in the prank. "You keeping the mittens?" she wanted to know. "They're nice mittens."

I told her she could have them.

---

Some time later, yet another night in the basement of the library, Mittens Boy stood in line behind the counter. When he came to the front he was smirking.

"What."

"I heard some creep broke into your room and left a pair of mittens on your bed," he said.

"It's true," I responded. "What kind of a creep would do something like that? Someone really fucking creepy, that's for sure."

He laughed.

"You are very creepy," I insisted redundantly.

He laughed again, and left.

I went to Florence soon thereafter, and didn't see much of Mittens Boy after that.